July 2016

It’s a busy Monday morning at the Starbucks in the Borgata Casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. As I wait in line to order my cup of tea I ponder things.

How many wombats can you fit in a wheelbarrow? Is Freud’s theory of personality still relevant? Should I get a DoG?

Observing the young lady strolling past the food court, I wonder about girls who wear teeny short cut off jeans and big tall leather boots: Is that a thing?

I looked it up, and I guess it is.

For narrative purposes, I’ll say I had this thought, too: That squirrel I watched in my back yard, eating cream cheese off a fork — was that the cutest thing or what?

Point is, I had plenty of time to think there at the Starbucks. But I snapped to attention when I saw that I had shuffled to the head of the line and I was on deck to place my order. When one of the two baristas on duty called out, “Can I help the next guest?” (they don’t just yell NEXT at Starbucks), I walked right up to the counter and spoke up, loud and clear: Small English breakfast tea, please fill it only 2/3rd full, and one croissant you don’t have to heat it up thank you.”

Then the other barista called for the next guest, and the next guest/woman behind me seemed to be very surprised to find herself on line at Starbucks. Oh! “the next guest” exclaimed, Oh! Um, hmmm…um…what I want…um…hmmmmmm…. And she frantically scanned the menu board above.

Wow, I thought to myself: You’ve been standing on line for 7 minutes and you don’t know what you want??? Are you always an asshole or is this a special occasion? Because, as we all know, it should come as no surprise that when you stand on line at Starbucks, sooner or later you’re going to have to order.

But then I decide to give humanity the benefit of the doubt:

She’s having a real hard time spitting it out, I think. WOW! Her order must be very complicated — one of those secret off-the-menu S’mores frappacino/non-dairy foam from Jupiter/ wave a degree from Cornell over it things that I’ve heard about.

I eagerly awaited her choice. And then, after lengthy hesitation, she, the next guest/ Starbucks customer, finally summoned the language she needed to ask for:

An iced coffee.

These days, I’ve been wondering how I can fill all the hours that used to be taken up by book-writing, now that these days, there isn’t a book that needs me to write it. I have very few options.

I can not do customer service because, present company excluded, I hate “customers” (see: Starbucks story above). I can’t do reality TV because I don’t want to frighten the cats by having a film crew stomping around my house. I can’t be Susan Branch because I’m waaaaay too damn cranky.

And it seems that there is no money in collecting Blue Jay feathers, which is really all I want to do these days.

By the way, on a day when I was not looking for Blue Jay feathers I had 3 feathers delivered to me, such as like this:

Ca-ching!

Sadly, the only thing I’m half good at is watching paint dry:

I’m painting a large (or should I say, Venti) view of the Chelsea Physic Garden. In my world, that’s 8 inches x 10 inches. But I got as far as this foreground bush (above) when I messed it up. It’s too dark — that’s a problem I often have: I load on the color too much, and I like it when the watercolor has a lot of water in it. I tried to rescue it by painting a layer of white goauche over it:

But that looked really stupid. So I started over, this time from the background:

Thank you for the love you gave my girl, Dame Helen Mirren, last week. I liked how I was close enough to get the spill-over! THANK YOU!

And, to follow up on having my article on my Top Ten Garden Books published by The Guardian last week, I got some push-back by a Commentor there who did not like my criticism of John Muir’s writing and wrote:

How appalling to open by denigrating John Muir who did more for the world than you surely will ever do. He helped found the first national park system which spread worldwide and caused more good in the world than any other conservation measure. You say you thrill like one of the bloggers to Marvell’s work; hard to believe. Muir is a beautiful writer who saw interconnection in all things. That vision remains desperately undernourished and misunderstood today.

Write your own books, fine, but think about the cost of rubbishing a fine thinker.

I wrote back a message that told her, in effect, that she should go soak her head, and she responded:

Nice person! True colours at last.

Try reading, thinking, understanding rather than resort to crudity. That is the last resort of the weak minded. Also, I don’t think you should be paid for writing this kind of language. It is appalling.

Ha! I wrote back: If you think I’m forfeiting the million dollars that The Guardian paid me to write this article…I’m laughing all the way to the bank!

I really can’t stand people.

So that’s what I was doing in Atlantic City this past Monday:I was looking to invest my windfall (journalism is so lucrative!) in property and I’d always fancied owning a casino. But since the Borgata. . .

. . . isn’t for sale, I had to search for other investment opportunities. I settled on buying the sunset:

So, appalled Guardian Commentor, if it’s twilight where you are and the sun is setting, don’t look at it. It’s mine.

Here’s the latest portrait of Dennis Whiskabottoms, with his newly-tipped ear:

See you all here next week, my Wonder Ones, with more stories from Down Time on the Isle of Long.

Dear Readers, it’s been an ugly Summer, day after day of bad news that breaks your heart 50 ways before breakfast . . . last week it was so bad that I and the 5 o’clock angel kept company every single day.

And now it’s Thursday and my article in The Guardian came out and I want a vat of white wine for breakfast. You can read it here, and then you can Comment on it all you want, but the author of the piece hates it. I want to go on a very serious whine about editing that shreds your Guardian article to shreds, but you and me and the world all have more bigger problems to worry about. See how mature I’m being? And, for being so Zen, I think I know just how to reward myself (see above).

Anyhoo:

Thank you, THANK YOU for the brilliant Comments you all left last week on the post about How To Be A Jerk. I love you all for making me feel that it’s not yet time to hang up the paint brushes and go all florange AGAIN — I really needed that. THANK YOU. You all deserve for me to respond to your brilliance one by one in this blog post, but the timing is off (don’t peek . . . I have a present for you at the very end of this week’s blather) so let me go back and reply in the Comments section of last week, and please allow me to explain this illustration before I give you all the best July prezzie ever:

From Le Road Trip, that’s my illustration of the tower of Michel de Montaigne who, while I’m being so philosophical and all, I want to thank for keeping me company this past week:

“I doubt if I can decently admit at what little cost to the repose and tranquillity of my life I have passed more than half of it amid the ruin of my country.”

If the famous essayist Michel de Montaigne had not died in 1592 . . . wait, let me start over. If the opinionated and always entertaining Michel de Montaigne were alive today he’d be a top lifestyle blogger, and he’d have written the above line more like this:

It might be indecent of me to admit this, but I’ve managed to live these past 30 years happily engrossed with my own inner life at the same time that my country was shitting out its brains in bloody civil war, brutal religious retaliations, and government-sanctioned massacre and assassination of its own citizens.

If you have to be sober these days, and I don’t recommend it, reading Sarah Bakewell‘s charming examination of the life and work of the immortal Michel de Montaigne will give you much-needed mental repose amid the heartbreaking reality of the world we live in.

Montaigne’s own words are, thanks to the wit and brilliant scholarship of Miss Bakewell, put in context of his bizarre upbringing (he was the son of a rich man who employed special tutors who only spoke to him in Latin for the first 5 years of his life) and the fashions of the day (the French King Henri III was considered weird because he had outlandish personal hygiene habits, such as washing his hair from time to time) and current events (the above mentioned wars and atrocities) of his time. And lordy, Montaigne lived in terrible times, more terrible than our own.

If Montaigne can do it — retain a personal and philosophical delight with the world while it was beheading Protestants, spreading the plague, and murdering cats — well, my Wonder Ones, so can we. I have to believe that.

That’s Steve (above), on my front wall, chowing down on dinner; and that’s the little Blue Jay feather I found floating in his water bowl when I went out to feed him. What can I say? Life has its moments.

Now for my gift to you all:

This is me (below), walking around our little village of Roslyn the other day, wearing what I thought was a very nifty walking-around outfit until I saw the picture that Top Cat took of it and me:

NO, that’s not the gift.

Helen Mirren turns 71 on July 26 and I’ve been collecting photos of her this past year because it is obvious that I need a mentor in how to look extremely nifty, and Helen’s my It Girl. And because I know that all you Dear Readers are My Kind of People, I know you love Helen Mirren too.

Happy Birthday, dear Helen; you are the human equivalent of a Blue Jay feather.

So here, from me to you, with love, is my photo essay titled

How To Live in Helen Mirren’s World.

Oh, man, we do loves us some Helen Mirren.

I ended with the coat that I want almost more than BlueJay feathers. How’s about you?

I’ve been meaning to give author R. L. Stein a piece of my mind for some time now, but world events and The Real Housewives of Orange County (please, Bravo, please fire Vicki) ate into my stockpile of ire. But it’s been almost a year since I was deeply offended by R. L. Stine and so, today I’m in the mood to discuss R. L. Stine’s interview with The New York Times Book Review of August 23, 2015.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party, the Times posits; Which three writers are invited?

R. L. Stine (who I never heard of but turns out he writes very popular children’s horror books) answers: Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Jane Austen.

So far, so good. But then he goes on:

And I would ask them all my all-time least-favorite question: “Where do you get your ideas?”

It’s that last bit, the part about how annoying it is for R. L. Stine, famous author, to be asked: Where do you get your ideas? that chaps my butt. Which I will discuss while I show you how I painted my latest Triscuit (since my anti-R. L. Stine tirade has no visual component):

I just love the way a Summer lawn looks when it is shadowed by sunlight flickering through leafy tree branches. Is there a word for that? There should be a word for that, and that is what I tried to paint in my latest Triscuit, which I painted this far (see below) before I had to throw it out and start all over because of those two mushy lumps of greenish yellow in the upper left quadrant, which are very ugly:

So I start over:

Back to R. L. Stine: Well, excuuuuuse me, R. L. Stine, and other writer-snobs of your ilk who I have heard and read deploring the same query posed by the un-writerly otherwise known as reader-type persons, if you find it sooooooo annoying to be asked how/where/when or why you were inspired to write what you wrote.

Albert Einstein, who by the way got a lot of far more important ideas than any freaking Goosebumps plot (by R. L. Stine), and he gladly answered the question re: How did yogurt that idea for general relativity? by describing the moment as “the happiest thought of my life“, when this idea popped into his head: To a man falling freely in a gravitational field, that gravity does not exist. And from there, a lot of important mathematics and an total upheaval of the Newtonian Universe ensued.

The only physicist since Einstein’s death to rival Einstein for brilliance, Richard Feynman, wrote about how he was sitting in a college cafeteria watching an underclassman throw a plate across the room (?), and realized that the center of that plate wobbled at a different rate than the edge of that plate and that there was no equation that explained the rate of spin, so he worked it out, just out of curiosity, and next thing you know he’s figured out quarks, and time travel, or some other such momentous usefulness that I can’t quite remember (but that’s a true story about the plate).

Virginia Woolfe wrote, in her diary of 1918, about a time when she was sitting in a field and saw “a red hare loping up the side & thinking suddenly “This is Earth Life”. I seemed to see how earthy it all was, & I myself [just] an evolved kind of hare; as if a moon-visitor saw me.” Next thing you know, Virginia Woolf is writing other-worldly stream-of-consciousness novels about the Earth life of characters such as Mrs. Dallowayand Orlando.

And R. L. Stine feels put out because someone wants to know where he got the idea for his character Slappy the Dummy???

R. L. Stein, I have just the T-shirt for you:

Ideas are wondrous gifts from the Universe! Ideas are what keeps us from being bored to death! Ideas can end up as anything from the double helix of DNA to croissants! And I LOVE croissants!!

So I think it is extremely shitty that R. L. Stine, or anyone who elaborates upon his or her unique ideas for a living (whether in words, numerals, chromosomes, or pastry dough) would find it tedious to explain the wherefore-art-thous of those ideas. Because maybe the people who ask that question, Where do you get your ideas?, are people who need to be inspired by the mysterious way that an idea, of, say, a red hare or a spinning plate lobbed by a college kid, becomes a novel or a Nobel Prize.

Or, maybe, that person is like me, and hasn’t come across a good idea in a long while and is looking for a hint as to where to look.

I got my idea for this Triscuit from walking past the local duck pond here in Roslyn village, on the Long Island of New York state (America) on a beautiful June afternoon.

I got the idea for my first book, When Wanderers Cease to Roam, from a 1939 Popular Science Encyclopedia article about electrons, titled When Wanderers Cease to Rove. As soon as I read those words — BOOM. I had a fabulous title and the raison d’être of my quasi-travel life story. Buying that dusty encyclopedia set for $10 at a Salvation Army Thrift Shop in central Pennsylvania 20 years ago and waiting 8 years to open volume 5 to that page with “Rove” printed on it remains one of my Top Ten Happiest Thoughts in my life.

My second book, Le Road Trip, wasn’t much of a hot idea — doesn’t everybody who goes to France want to make an illustrated travel memoir out of the trip? — but the idea for breaking the trip down into chapters that tracked the stages of a love affair came from a Wallace Stevens poem called Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I made every chapter of that book a different way of looking at France, one as a straight, linear story; one as a Day in the Life; one as a Top Ten list; one as an A to Z inventory; etc.

I regret not thinking of a better title than Le Road Trip, though — turns out that a lot of English-speakers are troubled by the “Le“. True story.

I felt compelled to write Gardens of Awe and Folly when I was looking through the huge Garden section of my local library couldn’t find not one book about garden travel at all, and none about gardens that I wanted to read. Why did every garden book have to be a How To, and a lot of that about How To determine your dirt’s personality?

So, if I had to invent an entire new genre of garden writing to produce a garden book that I could stand to read, then so be it. And voila: Gardens of Awe and Folly.

I didn’t have a title for the book until the week before it had to go to press. All I knew was that I had to have the word Garden in it, but nothing during the three years that I worked on it had appeared in a vision, not even when I went back to the Popular Science Encyclopedia and browsed all 10 volumes.

So, with time running out, I sat myself down and just began to make a list of all the words that related to the gardens in the book. And then the phrase Garden of Earthly Delights chimed in my head, and I knew that it had the perfect syllable count for a great title, but I had to substitute words for Earthly Delights (too cliche) and so, from sheer doggedness, I finally got to Awe and Folly.

I have to admit that I haven’t had a good idea since I worked that title out. And I am desperate for a good idea. I need a project.

So . . . where do your ideas come from?

If you’ve ever had a nifty brainwave from the Universe, or you know of a good story about where an idea came from, or you ave an idea that you wish someone would execute for you, please Comment. (It’s a tiny bit awkward to do that on this template: you have to click onto the READ MORE button at the bottom of this post.) If your idea or idea story triggers some scathingly brilliant notion for my next book, I WILL DEDICATE THAT BOOK TO YOU. I’m talking full page, front-of-the-book acknowledgement. Illustrated.

It’s like finding an early morning treasure when I come across Dennis, our recently-acquired feral freeloader, on the back patio when I go out to feed him at 6 o’clock in the morning — isn’t this a great way to start the day?:

And, sometimes, there’s other treasures out there, awaiting me:

You might remember that in last week’s blog post I demanded that the Universe send me a damn Blue Jay tail feather (for my collection). Well, later that same day, after sending my peevish request out into the infinite benevolent indifference, I was cleaning out my refrigerator and I smacked my head really hard and good against the corner of the freezer door handle, and it hurt like being jabbed with a hot pocker and smacked with a sledgehammer at the same time (I’m guessing) and is an injury that is only possible because I have this kind of out-of-style refrigerator:

A bump on the head is how the English actress Natasha Richardson died (in 2009) and is what killed Michel de Montaigne’s brother (in 1569). So I took care to notice any symptoms of double vision or confusion the rest of the day until bedtime, at which time I warily laid myself down to sleep with the thought that if I don’t die during the night, I would most likely wake up the next morning and sincerely thank my lucky stars (and you well know that in my case, I do that literally; the “stars” being the Sun and Deneb Algedi).

And I didwake up the next morning, and the first thing Idid do was promise the day that I would love it and treasure it. And then I forgot about it as I got out of bed and put Top Cat’s coffee on and fed the indoor cats and cleaned litter boxes and headed out to the back yard to give Dennis Whiskerbottoms his breakfast. And then came the small jolt of electricity when I saw the Blue Jay feather right at my tootsies.

Without meditation, without searching, even without being the least bit mindful of my endless quest for Blue Jay feathers and their purpose to remind me to pay astonished attention to life, there was my treasure, as if delivered right directly to me. I was reaching down to grab it into my chubby mitt when I remembered that such a momentous find needed to be photographed in situ:

I know it looks staged, but I can’t help it if the Universe is a tad ham-handed when it comes to depositing Her gifts at the feet of a wretch like me, and I promise that this is a true story:

And yeah, it’s a tail feather.

I KNOW! Life is like a dream! If, that is, you dream of Blue Jay feathers! Thank you, Blue Jays and Universe!

You know who else gives me dreams?

I have Taylor Swift to thank, from the bottom of my heart, every time I make a reservation or leave a message or make an appointment and I don’t have to spell my last name, S like Sam, W, I, F like Frank, T like Tom. And it would still end up as Smith or, most of the time during the 11-year run of the television show M*A*S*H, Swit.

Loretta Swit is a fine actress and exemplary animal rights and military veteran rights activist, but I don’t like her last name and I absolutely hated the inevitable “joke” whenever a stranger heard my name: Any relation to Hot Lips, ha ha?! I must have heard that “joke” thousand times in my 20s. No wonder I can’t stand people.

Taylor Swift is her generation’s Joni Mitchell, a brilliant singer/songwriter dream girl who is always ahead of fashion, and always has the hottest boyfriends. (If you don’t know Joni’s dating history, here’s partial list from back when these guys were the topper-most hot guys: James Taylor, Graham Nash, Jackson Browne, and I think one or two of the Byrds.)

Until recently, Taylor Swift was the long-time girlfriend (15 months, which is almost a decade in famous pop star years) of a handsome, 32-year old 6’5″ multi-millionaire DJ and Scotsman named Calvin Harris:

They were such a cute couple. But they did break up and shortly after they went to splitsville, I began having infrequent but repetitive dreams that I was back in my 20s. That alone would be a most excellent reason for me to wish for 12 hours of sleep every night, but wait there’s more. In my dreams, there’s also a young man, courting me, with a fervor and sweetness that only happened once in my real 20s, back when a book shop co-worker confessed that he had a crush on me and thought I was so adorable that if I were a dog, I’d be a collie.

I dreamt of that same scenario last night, only this time the dog-allusive young man gave me a gift that I was able to inspect in detail, and then later remember in detail after I woke up. It was a necklace, a fine gold chain on which were strung white pearls alternating with polished rock crystal spheres of a very beautiful type. Namely, colorless rutilated quartz:

Photo from the internet, curtesy of mineralminers.com.

I guess you can tell that I am a certified gemologist (from waaaaay back); I hardly ever dream of jewelry but when I do, I tend to be very specific about the gems. But rutilated quartz? That’s a new one. I didn’t know I liked it enough to dream about it. (FYI: I can not think of a way to put pearls and rutilated quartz beads on a gold chain, since piercing the quartz would pretty much ruin the effect of the rutile inclusions.)

It was while I was pondering upon this jeweled necklace that I figured out why I was dreaming these weird happy dreams of dating.

It’s because I’ve been closely following Taylor Swift’s new romance with the elegant and sexy actor Tom Hiddleston because yes, I read the Daily Mail.com every day so sue me. Tom Hiddleston is 35 (9 years older than Taylor), 6’2″, from a very classy family, English with a Scottish father, Eton and Cambridge educated. They met at the 2016 Met Gala and, in my opinion, he fell for her like a ton of rutilated quartz and swept her off her feet as soon as she became available. I like her with him.

So I’ve been feeding my mind lots of Taylor Swift romance and my brain only hears the Swift part before it jumps to conclusions, i.e., that the Swift it knows best is the Swift who was once favorably compared to a collie, so I’m dreaming about my old romance when I was Taylor Swift’s age. I’m old enough to have been Taylor Swift’s kindergarten teacher. Should I feel creepy?

Other follow-up from last week: I did make contact with the Cat Lady three streets over and she graciously gave permission to TNR her crew of feral freeloaders, so: YAY! Master trapper Susan has captured 9 of these guys so far, including the very sick one that we were out worried about.

Three Desperados (out of 15)

And as for Steve, well, he’s still Steve on our front stone wall, sleeping off a two-course dinner of Friskie’s Turkey & Giblets pâté and more Friskie’s Turkey and Giblets pâté, and dreaming of a three-course dessert of Friskie’s anything:

And, without segue, here are pictures from my little village on July 4th, Independence Day, America’s 240th birthday:

If not for watching the Blue Jays in my backyard, I’d be licking batteries, or kayaking, or whatever it is that people do to alleviate their boredom.

I used to think that I could never get tired of life because the world was so damn interesting that I’d have to stay alive just to find out what happened next. The tip-top height of my enthusiasm over the goings-on of this little rock adrift in the Universe was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, when I watched my fellow citizens of Planet Earth tear down a hateful ideology, joyously, hand by hand, with the whole world tuning in on their TVs to be there in spirit and celebration. Wow, I remember saying to myself, with pride in and hope for humanity; The 1990s are going to be awesome!

I don’t have to tell you how desperately I mis-read the situation. The 1990’s sucked, the 2000’s sucked a thousand times worse, and the 20-teens’s are trying their best to convince me that life (in the words of memoirist Mary Karr) is really nothing more than a shit-eating contest.

Thank DoG for these cat-food eating Blue Jays with the collectible feathers molting in my backyard.

This is a Blue Jay choosing dry cat food over luscious sunflower seeds. The tiny little yellow pellets — millet? — are always the last to go.

You see, in addition to my weariness with current events, I am also still not writing a new book, meaning that I am effectively unemployed. And it’s horrible. I like to work. I’m happy when I’m working…or, I should say, I’m less un-happy when I have work to do — I’m a Capricorn. We are not life-of-the-party people.

So I spend my days trying to keep sane by finding things to do. I color-code teveryhing hanging in my closet. I find fault with my home furnishings. I wonder how closely related I am to Taylor Swift (who is perfect, so shut up). I research YouTube for videos of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaking French (he’s perfect, even with his heavy Canuk accent, so shut up*****). It’s all very useful stuff, but it’s not real work.

Studs Terkel used his hammer-like intellect to hit the boredom-nail right on the head when he observed that work is about the search “for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

I found that quote in the introduction to Dave Isay’s excellent new book about people and the purpose and passion of their work, called Callings. Who knew that to the guy at Zabar’s deli counter, slicing lox is his calling?

I don’t, as of this writing, have a book that needs to exist in the world calling out to me, but I do hear the call of Blue Jays. So until further notice, collecting Blue Jay feathers is pretty much my job.

And so, as this is Take Your Blog Readers To Work Day here in VivianWorld, I’m going to take you with me as I do a search for All Things Feathery and Blue, which is the only way I know how to not let the terrorists win.

Starting out, I know that those Blue Jay feathers are already out there — all I have to do is find them. And if mind-mowing my front and back lawns doesn’t yield a plume or two, I start eyeballing the fringes of my acre of Earth. This is a neglected patch of old mulch near the garage:

The camera lies.

Because to my eyes, that teeny little Blue Jay feather amidst all that dead brown stuff is glowing like bright, hot, blue-glowing thing:

Sorry this picture is out of focus. The camera, again, misses the point.

Then I walked across the street and examined the rubbish along the curb for the same phenomena, which was bound to happen:

See it now?

Five minutes later, in the shade of a hemlock tree, it was pretty easy to be hit by another blot of tiny blue lightning:

If you are keeping count, that’s three in one day. But wait . . . there’s still the hideous late afternoon doldrums to contend with. So there I was, with Top Cat, sitting in our Adirondack chairs in the backyard, discussing whose turn it was to fetch ice cubes for the pitcher of vodka tonics we were working on, when I happened to look down into the clover patch that I have been defending for years now against Top Cat’s urge to go all fescue, and something not-clover swam into my ken:

There is no moral. There’s just, for the time being, four small reasons to keep the despair at bay. Plus, I haven’t found a tail feather yet (see: map of Blue Jay at the top of this blog post) and I WANT A DAMN TAIL FEATHER.

Before I go, I want to clear up the impression I might have given you, Dear Readers, last week, that I live amongst millionaires here on the north shore of the Isle of Long. Oh sure, there is the odd McMansion that goes for 1.388 million:

But this is the mansion directly across the street from me (and just two houses down from the cut-rate Tara of above):

One of my neighbors calls the local authorities about once a month to complain about this house, which he calls an eyesore (and it’s inhabited, by the way– by a bachelor who’s lived there since 1981), but I find it rather picturesque:

And, in keeping with my theme of what a slum I live in, I also recently discovered a bit of a Cat Lady situation three streets over:

I’ve been bringing food and water to these sweeties this past week, and have contacted the wonderful TNR (Trap, Neuter, Release) network about the 15 feral (that I’ve counted so far, and two are seriously ill) who live on this property, but the TNR people are all about Getting Permission from the Home Owner, and I’m all about trespassing the hell out of the place.

This is the basement window (in the pic above) that the home owner has rigged up with a tiny kitty door so that the cats can come and go in and out of the house — check out the two white paws visible above the head of the kitten that is far right — and the lawn is kept and tidy, but the food bowls are always empty when I check and the smell is about what you’d expect when you have 15 + cats using your yard as a litter box.

I’ve knocked on the door many times, I’ve asked the neighbors, I’ve left notes. I think I’m going to have to stake out the place to get a moment with the Cat Lady here, but no matter what she says I WILL get these cats. I’ve gone rogue before. I’m a one person Cats Protection League.

I’m sorry if reading this has raised your blood pressure — I feel my heart racing just thinking of the neglect, pure and simple, of these dear kitties going on here. Which reminds me that it’s time to TNR our new friend, Denny Whiskerbottoms, who is nothing if not fetching on a Sunday afternoon in the shed:

Steve, as you can see below, has gone totally groovy since he was TNR’d last month; so groovy, in fact, that when I came across him sticking halfway out from under the holly bush in the side yard, I thought he was dead:

He was just doing his Steve Yoga:

He favorite time for getting all Zen is after diner, when the cement on the front porch is in the shade, but still warm from gathering the day’s worth of star shine:

This is a true story: I put this exact image of Steve in my mind when I was getting my blood pressure checked last Friday; my first physical in eight years. I wanted to do well on the cardio front even though wearing those idiot paper gowns at the doctor’s office stresses me out. So I thought Steve Steve Steve, and my BP was 104 / 75. I did the same for the EKG and the doctor said to me, Wow — you have a nice slow heart beat!

So, between the bunny-butted bliss of my Manx Steve and the ever-blue joy of Blue Jays, I guess life won’t tire me out yet, and I will go forth, panther-pawed, in the ways of awe and folly.

This is from Ray Bradbury:

Not smash and grab, but rather find and keep;
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep
To detonate the hidden seeds with stealth
So in your wake a weltering of welath
Springs up unseen, ignored and left behind
As you sneak on, pretending to be blind.
On your return along the jungle path you’ve made
Find all the littered stuffs where you have strayed;
The small truths and the large have surfaced there
Where you stealth-blundered wildly unaware
Or seeming so. And so these mines were mined
In easy game of pace and pounce and find;
But mostly fluid pace, not too much pounce.
Attention must be paid, but by the ounce.
Mock caring, seem aloof, ignore each mile
And metaphors like cats behind your smile
Each one wound up to purr, each one a pride,
Each one a fine gold beast you’ve hid inside,
Now summoned forth in harvests from the brake
Turned anteloping elephants that shake
And drum and crack the mind to awe,
To behold beauty yet perceive its flaw.
Then, flaw discovered, like fair beauty’s mole,
Haste back to reckon all entire, the Whole.
This done, pretend these wits you do not keep,
Go panther-pawed where all the mined truths sleep.

*****

For those of you who might not know, our own Dear Reader Monique, French-Canadian as all get-out and an amazing photographer, has been to Paris and her blog posts about her June journey are not to be missed. I LOVED the get-away I got just by reading all about it here.